


His Legs of Iron

by nogoaway



Series: in the enraptured adoration [3]
Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Spoilers for S1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-07
Updated: 2016-01-07
Packaged: 2018-05-12 09:08:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5660740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nogoaway/pseuds/nogoaway
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sequel to <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/5610169">Some Strong, Rare Spirit</a>. Follows S1E19 through S1E22. Spoilers for those episodes. </p><p>He's never bothered to ask how Harold found him. Now that he knows, it feels less like Finch's strange divine providence and more like a random intersection of two strangers' desperation. A cosmic fluke.</p>
            </blockquote>





	His Legs of Iron

John has always liked yoga. It doesn't satisfy him physically like a long distance run does, or feed his brain like a spar with a worthy partner, but there's something to be said for the fluid transition between specific forms. Something to be said for particularity, and exactness. He doesn't vanish into it; rather, he becomes each shape fully, handing his body over to an external rhythm outlined centuries ago by men and sages who knew something sacred about the human form. It's a kind of trust.

The class is taught at an Upper Manhattan community center with some tenuous relationship to the VA hospital. It's full of veterans and other trauma survivors, and not strenuous. The most difficult part for John is how many of the civilian survivors are women, people who once ran afoul of one of the Peter Arndts of the world.

John always arrives five minutes late and leaves five minutes early. He works with a worn community mat in the back corner of the room. No one has ever approached him, but some of the women gave him nervous looks at first. They don't anymore. He's a fixture.

He tries not to think about how easily people become accustomed to monstrosity in their midst. Even these women, who have learned the hard way how dangerous the most familiar people can be, they turn their backs to John.

 _Bit of a late start, Mr. Reese_ , Finch says, as if he doesn't know _exactly_ where John goes from 0800 to 0900 on the second Tuesday of the month, _Did you forget to set your alarm?_

John feels his spine straighten automatically under his coat at the reprimand, however soft. Finch is in shirtsleeves and already tacking a fourth photograph onto the board. The lines around his mouth are set deeper than usual for nine thirty in the morning. Usually Finch doesn't get this tense without proximity to gunfire. Usually there's no gunfire before lunch.

The reason becomes clear when the fifth photo goes up: Gianni Moretti, Jr. The machine has sent them a tidy line of mob bosses, and Finch is deeply unhappy about it.

 _We could let the trash take out the trash,_ John suggests, irrationally irritated with the machine for even bothering Finch with something like this, a problem that can resolve itself. Finch has more important things to worry about than the fate of unquestionably monstrous people. That's John's job.

In retrospect, John should have killed Carl Elias when he had the chance. Finch wouldn't have even had to know.

But of course Finch is concerned about collateral damage, because Finch is a benevolent spirit who has made human suffering his business.

John tails mob bosses all day, and tries not to think about how long it would take Finch, as resourceful and clever as he is, to compile the list of _John's_ collateral damage. Widows, orphans. People in the wrong place at the wrong time, people who asked questions, people with the misfortune to work for a government that nationalized an oil industry or failed to sign a trade agreement. Other operatives who outlived their usefulness or met with the wrong person on a Milan street corner at night. Men and women who didn't do a job well enough; others who did a job _too_ well.

 _I've always been good with dogs_ , John says, because he knows men like Zambrano, Basile, Grifoni. Men like Carl Elias. They make an instinctive, terrible sense to him, all scents and hunger, and when Elias takes Taylor (Carter's son, Carter's _child_ , Joss Carter's _only son_ , _Detective Jocelyn Carter who trusted him--_ ), John sinks down into his own deep well of canine ruthlessness like a stone. Shoots for center mass on a crowded city street, spraying lead.

 _Finch. I need you to tell me where to find the boy_ , John says, and means it. He's nothing but needs at this point, cold and linear. Car. Directions. Firepower.

 _I'm a step ahead of you_ , Finch says in his ear and of course he is, of _course_. He always is. Even when John leads Finch, he is following, handmaiden to Finch's omniscience, beholden to a higher power that knows just how to use him from a distance.

But in the car next to him, Finch is different. Frightened. John knows he smells of blood and gunpowder, knows there's something on his face that he swore never to show Harold Finch.

He can't bring himself to care.

Finch parks the Lincoln a few blocks south of Kent Ave between Greenpoint and Williamsburg, in front of a derelict foam manufacturing plant. His hands shake on the wheel as John checks his UMP40 one last time. He apologizes for being useless. He offers to come inside, to take John's sidearm, to--

Harold Finch is frightened of John Reese, in that moment. John smells it rolling off of him in waves, something sharp under the fright _for_ John Reese, the fright _for_ Taylor Carter, and if John wasn't the steel spring of need he is at the moment he'd kill _himself_ for that, for making Harold Finch ever think that he needed to _compromise_.

He'd tell Harold Finch that he doesn't have to, _he doesn't have to_ , John will make it so he _never_ has to, John will burn the _world_ \--

 _That's okay, Harold_ , he says instead, and coaxes the Sig from Harold's cold, sweaty hands. _You can be the getaway driver_.

And then he goes inside, and shoots for center mass.

* * *

 

  
After Tommy Clay and his waitress girlfriend try and fail to make off with 1.25$ million worth of platinum, John goes home to his week-to-week studio in Red Hook and drinks heavily for the first time in six months. It's not the first time he's wanted to, but it is the first time Harold Finch has imposed leave time on John _while_ he wanted to.

("If I see you back here before that's healed, Mr. Reese," he'd said, face pinched, and John had not made him finish the sentence, he'd limped stiffly down the library stairs and back the way he'd come, leaving the tea and danish on an uncrowded shelf in History of Science.)

It's not surprising that Carter calls him, but John's a little surprised that he picks up. It's not like he's any use to her like this, cracked ribs and so deep in a bottle he probably couldn't undo his own door chain without assistance.

"How you doing, John," she whispers, with the sigh that means she knows the answer no matter what John says. So he doesn't say anything, just rests the cell between his cheek and the sticky vinyl of the sofa cushion, which is where he's wound up. "Do you want to talk about it?"

"Sure," John slurs.

The line crackles. It's quiet on her end; she's not at the precinct. Home, then, and Carter being home means it's past midnight, probably, or getting there.

"Your friend told me how they rigged that truck," she says finally, and mother-soft. "That must have been hard."

"Not my first rodeo," John says, and lets her think that's why; lets Carter think that the armored car flipping, the ringing in his ears, the stutter of muted gunfire in the street was what did it, a flashback come to get him in real time, instead of one he relived on his own.

John gets the impression that Carter's had her fair share of that kind of thing. The memory of being rocked against the side of a Humvee, the impossible moment where New York City becomes somewhere else; dry and bright, waking with sand in her mouth half a world away.

But that's not why. Those aren't the moments John relives, the times things were done to him. It's the times he's done things to others that stay.

And March always makes him think of Ordos, China. That dead empty city, and where he went after it.

"Yeah," Carter agrees. John hears something rattle; a cap twisting. She swallows.

They drink in companionable silence after that until John passes out. In the morning, he sees that she hung up at 0048, but the phone is on the low table next to the sofa, not the floor.

There's a glass of water, too, and a pair of pills nestled in an upturned bottle cap. John's shoes are off, paired neatly at the end of the sofa, and someone's pulled a soft wool afghan over him. John doesn't own a wool afghan.

He swallows the pills and staggers into the bathroom, finds a new toothbrush in a ceramic holder, an unopened tube of Umbrian Clay toothpaste, and a bar of soap with an unreadable label (Icelandic? Swedish?) that smells faintly of olive oil and rosemary.

John sits on the floor in front of his meticulously stocked refrigerator and thinks about the last time Harold Finch found John passed out in a room and re-arranged his life around him. How Harold Finch had sworn never to lie to John.

"Are you afraid of me, Finch?" John wonders, at the organic lettuce in the crisper, the fresh-squeezed orange juice, the stacked styrofoam containers of Indian, Thai, Italian, every one of them his favorites.

He knows he can never ask, now. He doesn't want to know the answer.

* * *

  
Harold Finch does not lie to John Reese, but Harold Finch does keep something from him.

John's birthday, his real one, falls on the second Tuesday of April. He doesn't go to the community center, because Finch does not like it when John is late. But Finch looks surprised to see John when he walks into the library at 0800 to find John sitting at his desk, browsing a materials science textbook. As if he hadn't expected John to understand, or heed, the unspoken reprimand on punctuality.

It only gets stranger from there. Finch smiles at him. Gives him a small box wrapped with a silver ribbon, the sort of thing one would find jewelry in, and the day off.

It's agonizing, and the worst part of it is that Finch probably thinks he's doing John a favor, letting him sit in the park and play Go with Han until almost lunch, and it's nice, but by 1100 John has listened to three Korean War stories and a Mets game and the lack of Harold's voice in his ear, even just to comment on John's choice of board game or conversation partner ("Former bodyguard of the late Marshall Peng Dehuai, Mr. Reese"), even just to breathe, has John fading in and out of himself.

"You there, Finch?" He asks a traffic camera on the corner of Spring Street and Wooster, and instead of _Always_ hears only the clatter and rush of Soho traffic.

If Finch didn't want John following him, John figures, he should have removed the GPS tracker John soldered into the frame of his spare pair of glasses two months ago.

 _What kind of 'sensitivities'_ , John finds himself asking, two hours and an uncomfortably silent car ride later, and no, Harold Finch doesn't lie to John Reese, not ever, he just evades. Goes quiet. Treats John like the rest of the world's population who don't know that Harold Finch is even alive, but who live under his protection all the same.

John thinks 'I don't deserve that', at the same time as he thinks 'I am angry.'

Jennings is taking Sarah Atkins north along the highway, out of the city. John made a promise to Sarah Atkins, but more importantly, John is angry.

 _Get out of the car_ , John says, before he has to smell fear on Harold Finch again.

* * *

 

John doesn't have to go to court, or to Wall Street, but Harold Finch buys him an apartment full of suits anyway.

John stares at them where they hang in his new, spacious closet, freshly dry cleaned and subtly different in the weave, the cut, the material of fabric and buttons. There are slacks next to them, and shirts, and a row of size 12 black leather dress shoes on a cedar rack low to the floor.

It was thirty four hours to Tamaulipas with Jennings in the trunk, and five hours plane ride back. Mexico always reminds John of Jessica, of four days of white sheets and clear skies and happiness, and he itches to rinse the memory away before it consumes him and swallows the present.

The shower is clean and square, with good water pressure and frosted glass sliding doors that barely whisper through their runners. He knows without looking in the mirror cabinet that there will be expensive toothpaste, and soap, and cologne. Medical supplies under the brushed steel sink, a kitchen full of fresh meat and produce and genuine La Creuset sets and Wusthof knives and imported spices. An ironing board, a Swiffer, rubber gloves and scrubber sponges and tins of dry Comet. A million calculated decisions from Harold Finch, who neither cooks nor cleans, about what John Reese could make use of.

John stands, hair dripping, in a blue flannel bathrobe (unpretentious, but warm. American made. Harold Finch wouldn't be caught dead in it) in his new kitchen, staring at the same battered aluminum stove-top espresso maker he used two days ago. Harold Finch, the man who made god, knows better than to reinvent the wheel.

John considers calling Harold Finch and thanking him. Apologizing, maybe, although he's not sure what he's sorry for, other than being what he is, and Finch _knows_ everything he is. Otherwise he would have bought John some chrome plated monstrosity of a coffee machine with timers and whistles and compartments that steam milk. Not driven from Chinatown to Red Hook and back again to transport a twenty-year old Moka pot John bought off a stoop in Gowanus for 2.25$. 

But rather than endure another opaque conversation where Harold Finch deftly avoids lying to him, John makes himself a cup of the pre-ground Sumatra on the counter and goes to drink it in front of the south-facing windows. They directly overlook Han's favorite table in Columbia Park, so apparently being friends with a former member of the People's Volunteer Army isn't a deal-breaker.

Yes, Harold Finch knows _exactly everything_ about John Reese, even his monstrousness. Even Jessica Arndt, whose name Finch slid away from with the same practiced steps John uses on civilians who he has no business hurting. He has no doubt that if he runs down the list on Harold's wall, her number will be there.

He's never bothered to ask how Harold found him. Now that he knows, it feels less like Finch's strange divine providence and more like a random intersection of two strangers' desperation. A cosmic fluke.

"I respect your privacy, Mr. Reese," John says, and laughs, because it's _not_ a lie, if Harold Finch believes it.

* * *

  
On a Saturday in May, Harold Finch buys five copies of an amateur literary magazine from five separate vendors, drinks Sencha Green tea out of a Kramer Paper Company cup, and leaves his microphone on while he talks with Henry Peck outside a Starbucks on Water St.

Two and a half miles away and underground, John is killing his third ISA agent in forty-eight hours.

This one is older than the other two, less predictable. Like John, he's picked up tactics from abroad. Fighting with him feels more like shadowboxing than anything else; they're evenly matched. The only thing he lacks is John's ruthlessness, the iron will cast and fortified by Finch's voice in John's ear. There are _orders_ , and then there is _Harold Finch's sacred mission to save the human race_. No contest, which of the two of them has more riding on the outcome of a scuffle in a basement apartment.

John still has to put him head first through a glass table to get him to stop moving.

"Do you know why you were sent for Peck?" He asks, more for Finch's benefit than anything else.

"Some pinko Assange bullshit," the man rasps through a film of blood, and John walks back over to retrieve the modified Five-Seven from where he kicked it under the dresser, and shoots him in the head.

He considers calling Fusco to help deal with the bodies, but ultimately decides to leave them. Let the Army clean up its own mess. As soon as NYPD ran their prints, someone from Washington would come to spirit it all away.

 _Knowing the answer has cost me something I value more than my own life_ , Finch is saying, and John feels himself smile because what is there that Finch _doesn't_ value more than his own life? He's out in the open right now, risking it for a man he's known for forty-eight hours, and it's hardly the first time.

It occurs to John that as much as he needs Harold Finch, Harold Finch needs him, too.

It still doesn't explain why he left the microphone on. It's the first time Harold Finch has listened to John kill someone. And it's the first time he's heard Finch speak with genuine sorrow in his ear, the first time Finch has told John Reese something of consequence, even tangentially, even by proxy.

_The human heart._

In his ear, Henry Peck's footsteps grow less and less distinct, vanishing into the flow of pedestrian traffic, and Harold Finch breathes, and breathes, saying nothing and everything at once. _You remind me of myself._

John Reese strips off his gloves and drops them down a sewer grate four blocks away, and goes to buy himself a cup of tea.

* * *

  
_Harold found me_ , Grace Hendricks says, and John likes her instantly, because of _course_ Harold had, and this woman was clever enough to recognize it.

Her house is small and lemon yellow and full of books and the smell of paint. She has long, narrow fingers like Finch does, artist's hands. The sketch on her easel is smooth and flowing, all brisk intuitive lines. Analog, not digital. There is an empty birdcage sitting on her desk, with old newspaper lining the bottom.

She is beautiful, and bright, and the loneliest person John Reese has ever met.

For the first time in nearly a year he remembers that Harold Finch can be cruel. There's no other word for the way Grace Hendricks runs her fingers along the edge of that picture frame as they talk, no other word but _suffering_.

 _I lost him two years ago_ , she says, as if she was the one responsible for it, the way Harold Finch flew into her life only to drop out of it four years later in favor of watching and manipulating from afar. Arranging her career, her hobbies, her mail, carefully maintaining Grace Hendricks in the exact state she was in when they lived together so that Harold can drift at a one hundred meter radius from her, pretending she is happy. A museum curator of this woman's life, omniscient and remote.

 _I'm sorry_ , John tells Grace Hendricks, and means it. He's so, so sorry, because he knows what it is to be _found_ by Harold Finch, and so he lives in fear of being _lost_ by him.

He wonders whether Grace Hendricks paints in the park anymore, or if that's been taken from her, too.

Harold Finch is waiting for him beneath the Washington Square Arch, watching Grace Hendricks' front door with the same proprietary sadness he turned on John after the Jennings case.

'Let her go', John wants to say. 'Let her fail. Let her change so that she can forget you, so that she can stop suffering'. But he says nothing, just hands Finch the paper cup of tea and steers him back into the anonymous Greenwich Village rush.

 _I had four years of... happiness_ , Finch muses, as if he's already forgotten what the word means, as if he had to go searching for it in a part of himself that exists only in photographs. The naive part, who entrusted his infallible creation to fallible masters. A human error.

 _Some people only get four days_ , and oh, but Harold Finch is cruel in the way only a human heart can be, and John Reese would _still_ burn the world black and bare for him, every wretched inch of it.

**Author's Note:**

> Thou, O king, sawest, and beheld a great image. This great image, whose brightness was excellent, stood before thee; and the form thereof was terrible. This image's head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass, his legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part of clay. Thou sawest till that a stone was cut out without hands, which smote the image upon his feet of iron and clay, and brake them to pieces. --Daniel 2:31-34


End file.
